"Who by his all-commanding might."
And, if power be one of the most frequent elements in the Miltonic thought, what is more frequent than light in the Miltonic vision? And is not that substitution of "did fill the new-made world with light" for the bare scientific statement of the original, a foretaste of the Milton who, all his life, blind or seeing, felt {97} the joy and wonder of light as no other man ever did? Do we not rightly hear in it a note that will soon be enriched into the "Light unsufferable" of the Ode, the "endless morn of Light" of the Solemn Music, the "bosom bright of blazing Majesty and Light" of the Epitaph on Lady Winchester, and, not to multiply quotations, of the "Hail, holy Light" which opens the great invocation of the third book of Paradise Lost?
It may be as well, before discussing the Ode and the other contents of the volume issued in 1645, to mention another poem which is of earlier date than the Ode, though it was not printed till 1673: the beautiful Spenserian lines On the Death of a Fair Infant. They afford the most real of the exceptions to the rule that Milton is always from the beginning to the end unmistakably and solely himself. In this poem he shows himself at the age of seventeen so soaked in Spenser and Spenser's school that, when his baby niece dies and he sets himself to make her an elegy, what he gives us is these graceful verses conveying as much as a boy of seventeen can catch of the lovely elegiac note of Spenser.
"O noble Spirit: live there ever blessed
The world's late wonder, and the heaven's new joy;
{98}
Live ever there, and leave me here distressed
With mortal cares and cumbrous world's annoy."
So sings Spenser of Sidney: and, though Milton is scarcely yet more the equal of Spenser than his baby niece was of Sidney, it is a beautiful echo of his master that he gives us in his
"O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted,
Soft silken primrose fading timelessly,"
and in
"Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead,
Or that thy corse corrupts in earth's dark womb,
Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed,
Hid from the world in a low delvèd tomb."
The poem is full of the then fashionable conceits, which appear again a little in the Ode, after which they are for ever put aside by Milton's imaginative severity and high conception of poetry as a finer sort of truth than prose, not a more ingenious kind of lying. Once, and perhaps once only, one hears in it the voice of the Milton of later years—
"Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire
To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire."